Gartner forecasts increase in information security spending

Global spending on information security products and services is predicted to rise to $81.6 billion this year, an increase of 7.9 percent over 2015, according to Gartner.

Consulting and IT outsourcing are currently the largest categories of spending on information security. Until the end of 2020, the highest growth is expected to come from security testing, IT outsourcing and data loss prevention (DLP).

Preventive security will continue to show strong growth, as many security practitioners continue to have a buying preference for preventive measures.

Elizabeth Kim, Senior Research Analyst at Gartner, said:

"Organisations are increasingly focusing on detection and response, because taking a preventive approach has not been successful in blocking malicious attacks. We strongly advise businesses to balance their spending to include both."

Kim added that security spending will become increasingly service-driven as organisations continue to face staffing and talent shortages.

Other key predictions include:

• The average selling price for firewalls is expected to increase by at least 2 or 3 percent year over year until the end of 2018
• By 2018, 90 percent of organisations will implement at least one form of integrated DLP, up from 50 percent today
• Public cloud adoption will impact firewall spending by less than 10 percent until the end of 2019 but will have an impact after that
• Half of midsize and large organisations will add bigger, more advanced inspection-oriented features to their network firewalls by 2019

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